Project Name
MES Pilot for an Open-Pit Gold Mining Group
Customer
NDA
Industry
Mining
Solution type
MES
Project Description
In Kazakhstan, where cattle farming plays a key role in the agricultural sector, improving productivity and maintaining herd The customer operates a full gold production cycle: open-pit mining, ore haulage, crushing and screening, conveyor stacking onto heap leach pads, sorption and desorption, electrolysis, and smelting of Doré bars. Production data lived in disconnected systems and spreadsheets — shift results became visible only after end-of-shift reports, and dispatchers coordinated operations by phone and radio.
Iotellect delivered an MES pilot covering the entire chain from pit to Doré. The system imports shift-daily production plans from the corporate ERP and calculates actual performance in real time from mine and plant data, giving every role — from shift operator to executive — a live plan-vs-actual view of the operation.
SOLUTION
Reporting. Daily, weekly, and monthly production reports, metallurgical balance, and KPI dashboards — equipment availability and utilization, recovery, and Doré output versus plan — assembled with the platform’s report builder.
Mining and ore receiving. Live status of excavators, drill rigs, and haul trucks; ore batch accounting with weighbridge data; ore grades from the LIMS bound to each batch; automatic calculation of metal-in-process and average feed grade.
Processing plant. Stage-by-stage monitoring of crushing, conveyor transport, heap leach stacking, sorption, electrolysis, and smelting, with recovery tracked against plan. Threshold alarms flag process deviations — for example, elevated gold content in tails triggers an alert, the operator logs the event, checks reagent parameters, and corrects the process.
Downtime and maintenance. Automatic downtime capture from plant systems with operator-confirmed causes, Gantt and Pareto analysis, equipment runtime counters, time-to-service indicators, and a weekly repair schedule on a color-coded equipment status map.
Hardware and Environment
The MES aggregates data from the corporate ERP (plans and equipment registry), fleet management system, truck scales, LIMS, plant data historians, and fuel monitoring and vehicle telematics systems, and feeds production actuals to corporate BI tools. Connections were built through the platform’s 50+ protocol drivers and low-code configuration rather than custom middleware. On-premises deployment with role-based access and a full audit trail of manual entries and corrections.
Benefits
- Production status is visible in near real time instead of after end-of-shift reporting;
- One version of the truth: duplicate manual re-entry into spreadsheets is eliminated, and every correction is logged and attributable;
- The customer projected that about 60% of dispatcher information needs would be covered by MES screens instead of phone and radio calls;
- Every downtime event is captured with its cause, enabling systematic bottleneck analysis across the production chain.
